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Tandy TRS-80 – Leftovers from 1980

Sadly, yes. I wasn’t able to find every game from 1980, like the Dunjonquest-series or Nellan Is Thirsty. Don’t worry though, those games were ported to many other systems, so I get to them eventually. There were also games I couldn’t finish, either because they stopped working midway through or they were too much of a pain in the a*ss.
Let’s talk about them anyway.

Strategy games by Avalon Hill

The cover art is amazing. Just look at it. But the actual games are only interesting if you get excited by Excel-charts. You have to constantly look at the manual to know what you’re supposed to do next and in the end it’s just typing in a command and waiting for stuff to happen.B-1 Nuclear Bomber is the worst offender.
“Oh, you want to fly to moscow? Well, that’s gonna take two hours.”
I literally fell asleep and it seems I didn’t miss much. Reviewers at the time weren’t very fond of those games either. Skip it!

Ghost Town

It’s a text adventure by Scott Adams and it’s the same game I played ten times already. Move around a haunted town, solve easy puzzles and collect thirteen items. Scott is milking his cashcow hard and I can’t take it anymore. Maybe in the future.

Time Traveller

Another text adventure. Travel through time and collect fourteen items. Nice idea, but the game it too bare-bones. Descriptions are only a sentence long and interaction with with other people consist of persuade and combat. At the start of each timeline you have to pick a side (like king or resistance) and then build a little army to fight against the enemy. The outcome is random and if you lose, you get thrown in prison and can say goodbye to your items. Great. I made it halfway through, but wasn’t invested enough to push any further.

Flight Simulator

Yes, this game was impressive at the time and it deserves attention but there isn’t much to do here. You can fly a plane and you can use your imagination to transform the black and white grid into lush, green mountains and after a while you can crash to see a nice game over screen and that’s it.
It’s an achievement in the simulator genre and you should definitely give it a try for historic reasons. But it’s pretty much impossible to give it a fair review today.

There is one more game I want to talk about that I’m gonna save for tommorow. You can probably guess why.